With the passing of Amitai Etzioni, we are looking back at his contributions to communitarian thought and organizing.

Via the Communitarian Network:

In 1990, a group of academicians and social thinkers came together to formulate the core ideas they shared, spelled out in the Responsive Communitarian Platform, and to spur the movement toward a recasting of the social and moral foundations of society. A quarterly journal, The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, was founded in 1991 to provide a forum for the development and exploration of Communitarian ideas. In 1993, Amitai Etzioni formed The Communitarian Network, a non-partisan, transnational, not-for-profit network of Communitarians, and he has since served as its director.

Highlights of the Responsive Communitarian Platform:

• Neither human existence nor individual liberty can be sustained for long outside the interdependent and overlapping communities to which all of us belong.
• The exclusive pursuit of private interest erodes the network of social environments on which we all depend, and is destructive to our shared experiment in democratic self-government.
• A communitarian perspective recognizes both individual human dignity and the social dimension of human existence.
• A communitarian perspective recognizes that the preservation of individual liberty depends on the active maintenance of the institutions of civil society where citizens learn respect for others as well as self-respect; where we acquire a lively sense of our personal and civic responsibilities, along with an appreciation of our own rights and the rights of others; where we develop the skills of self-government as well as the habit of governing ourselves, and learn to serve others– not just self.
• A communitarian perspective recognizes that communities and polities, too, have obligations–including the duty to be responsive to their members and to foster participation and deliberation in social and political life.
• America’s diverse communities of memory and mutual aid are rich resources of moral voices–voices that ought to be heeded in a society that increasingly threatens to become normless, self-centered, and driven by greed, special interests, and an unabashed quest for power.
• The success of the democratic experiment in ordered liberty (rather than unlimited license) depends, not on fiat or force, but on building shared values, habits and practices that assure respect for one another’s rights and regular fulfillment of personal, civic, and collective responsibilities.
• Communitarians favor strong democracy. That is, we seek to make government more representative, more participatory, and more responsive to all members of the community.
• We seek to curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government.
• A responsive community is one whose moral standards reflect the basic human needs of all its members.
• We must insist once again that bringing children into the world entails a moral responsibility to provide, not only material necessities, but also moral education and character formation.
• Fathers and mothers, consumed by “making it” and consumerism, or preoccupied with personal advancement, who come home too late and too tired to attend to the needs of their children, cannot discharge their most elementary duty to their children and their fellow citizens.
• It follows, that work places should provide maximum flexible opportunities to parents to preserve an important part of their time and energy, of their life, to attend to their educational-moral duties, for the sake of the next generation, its civic and moral character, and its capacity to contribute economically and socially to the commonweal. Experiments such as those with unpaid and paid parental leave, flextime, shared jobs, opportunities to work at home, and for parents to participate as volunteers and managers in child-care centers, should be extended and encouraged.
• Child-raising is important, valuable work, work that must be honored rather than denigrated by both parents and the community.
• It follows that widespread divorce, when there are children involved, especially when they are in their formative years, is indicative of a serious social problem. Though divorces are necessary in some situations, many are avoidable and are not in the interest of the children, the community, and probably not of most adults either. Divorce laws should be modified, not to prevent divorce, but to signal society’s concern.
• We ought to teach those values Americans share, for example, that the dignity of all persons ought to be respected, that tolerance is a virtue and discrimination abhorrent, that peaceful resolution of conflicts is superior to violence, that generally truth-telling is morally superior to lying, that democratic government is morally superior to totalitarianism and authoritarianism, that one ought to give a day’s work for a day’s pay, that saving for one’s own and one’s country’s future is better than squandering one’s income and relying on others to attend to one’s future needs.
• What can be done by families, should not be assigned to an intermediate group–school etc. What can be done at the local level should not be passed on to the state or federal level, and so on. There are, of course, plenty of urgent tasks–environmental ones–that do require national and even international action. But to remove tasks to higher levels than is necessary weakens the constituent communities.
• Being informed about public affairs is a prerequisite for keeping the polity from being controlled by demagogues, for taking action when needed in one’s own interests and that of others, for achieving justice and the shared future.
• One of the most telling ills of our time is the expectation of many Americans that they are entitled to ever more public services without paying for them
• Campaign contributions to members of Congress and state legislatures, speaking fees, and bribes have become so pervasive that in many areas of public policy and on numerous occasions the public interest is ignored as legislators pay off their debts to special interests.
• To achieve this major renewal and revitalization of public life, to reinstitute the prerequisites for attending to the public interest, requires a major social movement, akin to the progressive movement of the beginning of the century.
• At the heart of the communitarian understanding of social justice is the idea of reciprocity: each member of the community owes something to all the rest, and the community owes something to each of its members. Justice requires responsible individuals in a responsive community.
• Beyond self-support, individuals have a responsibility for the material and moral well-being of others. This does not mean heroic self- sacrifice; it means the constant self-awareness that no one of us is an island unaffected by the fate of others.
• We differ with the ACLU and other radical libertarians who oppose sobriety checkpoints, screening gates at airports, drug and alcohol testing for people who directly affect public safety (pilots, train engineers, etc.).
• What we need to significantly enhance public safety is domestic disarmament of the kind that exists in practically all democracies.
• We join with those who read the Second Amendment the way it was written, as a communitarian clause, calling for community militias, not individual gun slingers.
• Our communitarianism is not particularism. We believe that the responsive community is the best form of human organization yet devised for respecting human dignity and safeguarding human decency, and the way of life most open to needed self-revision through shared deliberation. We believe that the human species as a whole would be well-served by the movement, as circumstances permit, of all polities toward strongly democratic communities.
• Although it may seem utopian, we believe that in the multiplication of strongly democratic communities around the world lies our best hope for the emergence of a global community that can deal concertedly with matters of general concern to our species as a whole: with war and strife, with violations of basic rights, with environmental degradation, and with the extreme material deprivation that stunts the bodies, minds, and spirits of children. Our communitarian concern may begin with ourselves and our families, but it rises inexorably to the long-imagined community of humankind.
• If communities are to function well, most members most of the time must discharge their responsibilities because they are committed to do so, not because they fear lawsuits, penalties, or jails. Nevertheless, the state and its agencies must take care not to harm the structures of civil society on which we all depend.
• Although the ultimate foundation of morality may be commitments of individual conscience, it is communities that help introduce and sustain these commitments. Hence the urgent need for communities to articulate the responsibilities they expect their members to discharge, especially in times, such as our own, in which the understanding of these responsibilities has weakened and their reach has grown unclear.

Founding Endorsers of the Responsive Communitarian Platform included: Robert N. Bellah, James Childress, Henry Cisneros, William D’Antonio, Stuart E. Eizenstat, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Francis Fukuyama, William A. Galston, Mary Ann Glendon, Nicholas Katzenbach, Elliot L. Richardson, Philip Selznick, and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels.